Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

My current ethnographic study looks at the social politics of cycling but does so from the perspective of the spatially intuitive team relationships that road cycling requires. Like rowing (a sport I have previously studied), cycling requires athletes to collaborate with carbon-based machines to move through space, though the activities are very different insofar as one occurs on water, the other land, and one requires bodies to move backwards, the other forwards. The “hybrid” bodies achieved through the motions of cycling are further complicated by bunch riding formations. The proprioceptive competencies required in these swarm like movements are intuitive but also subject to intense cultural static. I am particularly interested in the fraught competitive impulses that emerge when men and women cycle together. I outline the initial findings of my participant observation research among an amateur Sydney cycling club where I cycle up to two hours a day, four days a week. The athletic exhilaration and fatigue I experience alongside other male and female veteran riders speaks to the collective affects that are created within these surging formations on the road. As I will reveal, these affects are cut across by wider group logics of identity formation and gender.